A Night in the Day

When Alicia Weston left her job as a stockbroker in 2010, her options were open. She could have spent her obligatory non-compete period sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere; instead, she founded a charity supper club. She would cook high-quality, multi-course meals for guests in her Dalston home; of the fee diners would pay to attend, a fiver would go to covering costs and the rest would go to charity. Alicia, 42, now manages The Parkholme Supper Club alongside her day job at a think tank. Her themed dinners have become an East London institution, with some becoming booked up in just a few hours.

Guests enjoying homemade gourmet fare at Alicia Weston’s charitable Parkholme Supper Club in Dalston (photo from Eat Hackney)

Similarly, 31-year-old Hannah Pinchin found herself with time to spare after turning in her thesis for her PhD in microbiology in 2011. A long-time vegan, Southampton-based Hannah had found it difficult to get vegan goodies without travelling to London. So she set up the Hannah Banana Bakery, an online shop where she sells the cruelty-free cakes, cookies and confectionery she creates. Between the bakery and her work a post-doctoral researcher, Hannah’s at it seven days a week – days that sometimes end early the next morning.

Alicia and Hannah are among the approximately 1.1 million people in the UK who, according to statistics released last month, hold down a second job. For many of these people, the imperative is a bit of extra cash as recession puts a squeeze on the workforce. For others, it’s to pursue a particular interest or skill, perhaps one the primary job doesn’t nurture or address. Evening Entrepreneurs – creative, get-up-and-go types who are growing their own businesses in their time off – tend to fall into the latter category. Money aside, it’s personal satisfaction they’re after, and they’re willing to give up their downtime to get it.

Such is the case for 28-year-old Eliot York, a software developer who works by day at the educational startup Memrise. Eliot’s also the founder and manager of HelloPoetry.com, a website that allows its 30,000 registered writers to share their work online. Creating the site back in 2009 “was an excuse to combine two things I liked, programming and poetry,” he says. Within a year, it had opened up to a thousand poets and has been expanding ever since. Despite the site remaining “more like an income sink”, Eliot says that he keeps on with it because of the ways it complements his nine-to-five. “On Hello Poetry I have complete creative control, which makes taking orders during the day much easier. At Memrise I get to work with an awesome group of people, which makes it easier to work in the dark, isolated hours of the night.”

In the last decade or so, technology has dramatically changed the ways we’re able to work. Smartphones and speed-of-light wifi connections mean that anyone can tend to their projects anytime and from nearly anywhere. Indeed, it has allowed 32-year-old Mariella Tandy, Tatler’s busy Executive Retail Editor, to run her budding e-business in the lulls between launches, meetings and events. “The building part was the time-consuming bit,” she says of her pet project WardrobeConnect.com, a vintage and designer resale website that went live in December. Before that, Mariella would put in up to three hours in the morning before arriving at Tatler HQ. Now that the user-driven trading platform is up and running, she just makes sure it ticks over, which isn’t quite as work-intensive. “I work on it now before and after work … [I] may grab five minutes to answer emails during lunch or in a taxi when I am shuttling between meetings,” she says.

As well as her role as Executive Retail Editor at Tatler, Mariella Tandy runs Wardrobe Connect; a vintage and designer resale site…

Unsurprisingly, having a whole other career can be hard on one’s social life. After leaving a gig as a videogame artist, 30-year-old London animator Lewis Young teamed up with a friend from university to mastermind a shadow-puppet show, which eventually became The Great Puppet Horn. Now he juggles a day job at an independent production company with as many shows as he and his partner can handle, including the Edinburgh Festival in 2012. “I missed my friends rather a lot last year. It feels especially wrong logging on to Facebook to invite them to a gig, then realising you’ve missed a whole load of their events,” he says. Hannah, meanwhile, spent this Valentine’s Day baking cakes for other people, filling the nearly five hundred orders that had poured in for February 14.

So having a sideline may put a strain on personal lives – could it complicate working relationships too? “I think there are lots of issues,” concedes Kath Houston, career coach and Senior Lecturer in Employability and Enterprise at the University of Central Lancashire. There may be a conflict of interest if there’s significant overlap between what someone wants to do on their time off and the content of their day job, for example. Also, due attention should be paid to intellectual property rights: a piece of work might actually belong to an employer if an employee created it during working hours. Finally, people might not be getting enough rest and relaxation if they are packing so much in to their waking hours. “But I think also this desire to be self-directing is very important … I think we shouldn’t be babying people either,” says Houston, who has written numerous books in her time off. “They make choices about what they do in their spare time. If they’re choosing to work very hard to create some enterprise that will mean that they’re not a victim of the labour market in the future … I think it’s a genuinely very good thing.”

Indeed, some employers are supportive of their staff’s out-of-hours projects. Eliot recently found out that his online poetry platform was one of the golden nuggets on his CV that got him the job – his boss has even published work on the site. A sideline might mean new contacts, greater motivation, and a broader skill set, so it’s unsurprising that some employers see it as an asset. “I learned to run a website, I had to gather email addresses, marketing, mailing lists,” says Alicia of starting up her supper club, which has raised over £25,000 for charity. “It’s almost like a learning experience and I’m able to use it elsewhere.”

Whereas people may once have been happy with one job, some are now demanding more from their working lives – even if it means working really hard. For those who don’t mind burning the midnight oil, it seems like a worthwhile endeavour. For Alicia, taking on the supper club has enriched her life: “I have met new people, I have learned new skills,” she says. “When I was just a plain vanilla stockbroker, I didn’t have any of this.” Mariella sees Wardrobe Connect as “another form of creative outlet, which is fun”— in spite of all the early mornings spent tweaking it to perfection. Meanwhile, Lewis has endured the “torrid all-nighters writing and creating” for a pleasure that’s harder to pin down. The independence, the extra cash, and the creativity aside, something else keeps him going on the Great Puppet Horn. “I haven’t the foggiest why I do it,” he says, “but I do know I miss it when I don’t.”

Animator Lewis Young teamed up with a friend to create a shadow-puppet show, which eventually became The Great Puppet Horn